THE CUCKOO: V

Completed August 1, 2021 (♌︎)

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Olan little knew what day or season it was when he first awoke, and he feared that he should never find out. Zeltennia was a castle built on and amidst ruins, and its dungeons wove into catacombs and passages built before the days when Ivalice knew the light of faith. When he awakened to a lightless nothing, he considered that they'd found some place well beyond everything to serve as an oubliette, that he should be left here to wither away with all the other things the coming order would forget. He moaned as he sat up, trying to recall what had happened after the fray with Delita. His injuries were dressed—a promising sign—but they were very much still with him.

"I'm glad they didn't leave me with a corpse."

It was a woman's voice: one he didn't recognize.

"Are you part of the purge?"

Olan shook his head. It took him a second to recognize that whomever she was couldn't see him.

"Is there a purge now?" he asked.

"Your new general is certainly finding traitors with alarming speed these days, so I hear. I doubt I should be shuffled around and housed together with strangers if things weren't moving fast."

Olan took a deep breath. Something ached in the muscles of his ribs.

"I've heard they're going to execute me soon," the woman continued. "Have you any word on that?"

"My lady—" He laughed; it hurt. "We've hardly been introduced… and despite everyone's high estimation of me, I'm a very poor fortune teller."

Olan rubbed his hands together, trying to think through a decent cantrip by which he might get himself a little light. He didn't want to waste his efforts on anything too showy.

"In any event, I'm glad to make your acquaintance," he said.

His companion did not reply. Olan chanted a few words in old Ikoku, opened his palms, and let a tiny winking diamond flicker up and away from his hands. It was the polestar in miniature, and it looked a very welcome sight to him even if it only had a dungeon as its sky.

"I'm Olan Durai, previously the court astrologer." He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the light. "And you are…"

He saw now that a pale-haired woman was sitting across from him, and he immediately placed her as somebody he ought to know. She did not answer him, and she seemed very much bewildered as he gestured for his false star to illuminate her features.

"It's a spell for developing model sky charts," he started to explain as he tried to recall who she might be. "Given the circumstances, though, I fear we can only afford one star."

"You're an astrologer?" she said quietly after a moment. "I met one of those once."

Olan nodded, not really knowing what to say. He looked around the room in which they had been confined and found to his relief it was of an architecture he recognized. Turning back to his cellmate, he caught a glimpse of her in profile.

He recognized it suddenly as one he'd turned over in his hand before—a face that he'd met while thumbing over the contours of a coin.

"Queen Ruvelia?" he whispered.

"I'm glad somebody still accords me the title," she replied darkly.

"I'd thought you disappeared at Bethla."

"I suppose I did." She sighed. "I wonder if I should be made to reappear before they're done with me."

Olan did not know what to say. While he had little love for what the Southern Sky had become, he was no friend to the former regime. For all he had come to doubt several of the Senate's claims, his conviction was still that Ruvelia Atkascha had a hand in the many unfolding treasons he'd borne witness to.

"If you have any advice, I'm sure to take it." She laughed darkly. "All this might have never happened had I listened to my astrologer."

"My lady?"

"I wed a Capricorn against advice."

Olan's eyes narrowed as he coaxed the light back closer towards her. He slowly recalled to himself that the former queen had been born in Gallione.

"Your astrologer," he asked hesitantly, "how old was he when you consulted him?"

Ruvelia looked at him, and for a moment nothing was said.

"Son of the Southern Sky," she said softly, "did you ever visit Igros in your childhood?"

Olan laughed then—loud and long—and the queen joined him even without his answer. It took them a good minute to calm themselves.

"Saints! That was you on that balcony!"

She nodded, smiling. "May—the same year the Romandans came—you predicted Bamjik's comet come twelve years too soon."

"I remember! Ramza Beoulve stealing my father's sword while I stood accused of stealing the duke's daughter! Ajora's teeth, what sort of story are we caught in, my lady?"

"One in which I am at last stolen away to Zeltennia, I fear." Her voice remained warm, but grew less merry. "And one House Beoulve shall never see ended."

"Why do you say that?"

She said nothing for a moment.

"I was told the Beoulves are dead now."

"How so, my lady?" Olan asked quietly. "I had no such word before I came here."

"They say they both killed one another, although that part must be a lie." She fidgeted with the fabric of her gown, clearly ill at ease. "I expect it will be a good enough contrivance for a coming regime. The victors can say what they will, and history will be writ to confirm it."

"You said 'both,' my lady?" Olan asked haltingly. "Did you mean..."

She smiled bitterly. "I suppose the heretic might well be alive, for what it's worth? He's unlikely to lead the white lion to victory though. With my brother gone, I fear I'm all that's left..." Her voice cracked as it dropped to a childish whisper. "And I'm... here."

Olan did not know what to say. He was glad that Ramza had not been reported slain. He knew little, however, what to make of the woman before him, obviously distracted and evidently grieved.

"I'm here too," he said after a little span.

"I suppose you are."

"I cannot say whether or not they'll kill you—I can't even say as much for me. I can say that all of this runs much deeper than you or I or those imprisoning us really know: that strange things have beset this war from the beginning, and we can't really know how it will end."

He was trying to be reassuring. Olan recognized as he spoke, however, that his words comforted neither of them. He put a hand over his face, and wondered briefly if he would have to reckon time by his stubble.

"Oh, it runs deep, little astrologer. I assure you." She seemed increasingly frantic now. "Your false princess cannot know the smallest mote of it—none of you..." She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. "There's a whole terrible world of human ugliness that goes unrecorded."

The star wavered, and Olan could just make out a shimmer of liquid falling down her cheek.

"Shall I tell you about it? If I awake tomorrow and both of us live—would you even want to know?"

"My lady..."

He could hear it as the pattern of her breath altered, as some flutter of strange feeling passed over her.

"I can tell you who poisoned the queen mother—who fed her flowers until her tongue stained itself from black." She shook her head as she began to tremble. "I can tell you who poisoned the princes before that if you'll believe me, and who poisoned me, and who the king. I could even tell you what happened to General Beoulve, if you'd listen."

She was obviously caught in some mania now. Olan thought to stories of prisoners falling to madness for want of a sky to look upon. He wondered how long she had been here alone.

"If we're alive tomorrow, perhaps you can find the star that set us wrong," She laughed in the midst of her crying. "Perhaps there's some influence up there by which it all happened—by which our lives were poisoned before we were born and shall be poisonous after—by which this future for us was built. I wonder who poisoned you, even?" She sobbed hard. "It seems to run to our marrow these days."

"My lady," he grabbed her arm and held it firm.

"Forgive me," she sobbed.

There was a long moment in which she seemed to break down completely—to give herself over to an excess of misery that outweighed her reason. When she finally left off weeping, she apologized as best she could for the outburst, saying she realized how little sense she spoke. Olan tried his best to comfort her, bewildering as the whole situation was to him.

The star eventually began to blink out and darkness fell upon them. One of the last things Olan remembered before sleep overtook him was the queen reiterating her promise, save in tones more solemn and sane. She vowed to tell him a history unheard by others if there was nobody else to hear it—that she should have him as a confessor if her fate was the gibbet.

He was not surprised to find himself alone the morning next, and in all the ensuing fuss that followed regarding his fate and that of the Church's wayward witch, he never asked what had befallen the queen to whom he had been confidant on two very different nights.

In all the years that would follow, Dycedarg would look back to Orinus Atkascha's first birthday and think there had been some great abyss between the first act of that evening and the second. It was as though the comet above them had cut time apart—that Ruvelia's little gasp at seeing the sky above them had happened a thousand years before she should knock on the door to the room in which he'd been quartered.

Perhaps it was on account of how desperately he had tried to put the meeting in the maze out of mind.

It was well after all sensible creatures were asleep—a little beyond when night first feels oppressive but still before the first traces of dawn make themselves known. He had been reading an old treatise on spontaneous generation: on eels come from worms and geese from barnacles. When he heard the knock and cracked open the door, he did not know what he felt to see the queen of Ivalice come to him, cloaked and covered as she had once done so very many months before.

"Are you hoping to have me as some manner of consolation?"

She looked at him but did not answer. Dycedarg did not stop her as she pushed her way into the room. He continued:

"I suppose I should take some affront at it, you know," he said bitterly. "Perhaps I should bid you to go try for poor Ramza first before you settle for me again."

"Are you going to?" she asked quietly, throwing back the hood of her cloak to reveal her unbound hair. "I will leave if you tell me to."

They looked at one another, and Dycedarg could see, even by candlelight, that there was something in her gone very soft. He wondered if she had been crying.

"No," he replied. He felt his shoulders go slack as she took a step towards him.

When her arms were around him again, he was not thinking of who might be searching after her whereabouts. Nor was he thinking about the insult he should feel—on behalf of himself or of his previously beset brother. He was thinking of nothing it seemed, save for the familiar sensation of her body warm against his own—of the weight of her when she was held. When he had a notion to ask her about what she had been thinking or how long she had clung to her hopes, he put off the urge to speak by kissing her.

She sobbed a little—something like a hiccup—as he felt his grip around her tighten.

"Do you despise me?" she asked when their lips parted.

Dycedarg closed his eyes. He tried to decide if he did—if he bore this woman whose life had been tangled about men's useless ambitions and caprices any ill will for wanting a man as uncapricious as Zalbag. If he faulted her for having harbored a secret he hadn't the cunning to unravel.

"I know you hate my brother," she whispered. "If you—"

"I do not hate you."

He touched her face.

"I hate... many things. I think this world is a very hateful one." He kissed her again, and held her tighter as she shuddered. "I do not hate you, though."

She kissed him back.

He thought—perhaps—that the only things he did not hate were those set at the center of a green labyrinth with him that night.

They parted from each other's embrace to shed their clothing, to move to the bed, to snuff the candle. When Ruvelia pinned him down, mouth hot and hungry against his skin, he fell precisely where she would place him. It was a strange sort of ecstasy to realize that all of this was without any purpose—that it gained them nothing save danger of discovery. When she lowered herself atop him and he felt the length of him sheathed once more within her, he gasped hard.

Dycedarg did not let his thoughts wander to any of the night's other potentialities; he did not let himself wonder whose features she had traced upon him in the dark all those countless nights prior.

Ruvelia remained very soft, and her hands on his chest very light. As she began to buck her hips against him, he let his hands feel for her belly, the ridges of her bones, her thighs. He wanted very desperately at moments to throw her back against the bed and do her all manner of violence in his passion. He did not.

Dycedarg merely allowed himself to be ridden as she rode him once again, as she moaned and panted atop him. As the first trills of birdsong echoed through the black night beyond them, he let himself vanish into her. Ruvelia could do as she liked and he would be dead to every concern outside their mingled bodies and groans—of her lips against his neck and against his face. When she cried out—and she cried out more than once—he made no attempt to stifle her.

When she was finally done with him—when she collapsed in a tumble on the white eiderdown quilt and refused to move—Dycedarg did not bid her leave. He did not tell her that she should be missed or warn her that they should be caught. He lay beside her as the black seemed to wash itself from the sky, listening for the rhythm of her breathing next to him as her body gradually came into view in the growing light.

Even when he heard the long toll of Lesalia cathedral's bells, he feared to wake her. He felt very resigned in that moment to being caught and hanged for treason if it meant another span of seconds in which nothing between them stirred but the whisper of their breath.

It was very fortunate for them both that when calamity awakened the palace as a whole, it was not on their account. The royal physician had attended the king that morning to discover him in a catalepsy, and there was great panic in the span of that hour before magic and medicine could restore him. Ruvelia, when she was finally to be found, had been awake for some time, and she conducted herself with all the concern expected of a distraught wife.

It was not yet autumn, and he rode on a light courser bred for speed, a pair of the Northern Sky's elite trailing him as they pushed into Fovoham. Bestrald Larg knew he was not the best man suited for this leg of the mission. He was a creature better used to intrigue committed across card tables and in palace chambers. He had spent much of the war in the comfort of Igros.

He was determined, nevertheless, that he should be among those to see his nephew to Romanda—that he would take no comfort in the child's safety unless he could see the men with whom he'd made this alliance.

The cool breeze coming off of Riovanes Bay made it seem all the later in the season as they approached. Everything was still very green however—wild enough in places that it seemed to border on oppressive. The highlands in Gallione were all burnt yellow by now, and it felt strange to ride through a place jeweled and bright as if it were set in a book. One of the riders gestured as they neared the village where both the boat and the boy should be waiting.

They slowed, approached, dismounted and began to look for the place outside of which they were to meet—something called the Red Whale. Bestrald, despite all the disasters of the past week, did not steel himself for any disappointment. The child would be there, he told himself. To think otherwise was to invite the possibility of failure.

He finally found a shingle with something like a whale on it. When he saw the two figures beneath it, he did not mark the jolt in his breast as any indication of surprise. Dycedarg and Orinus were sitting together on a bench outside, their skin and hair bright in the harsh sun. As he drew close, he could hear a long trilling warble—high-pitched and sharp. Bestrald was long familiar with the sound. It was followed by a laugh and a shriek from his nephew.

"Uncle!"

Orinus ran to him very suddenly and with all the happy ignorance of a child who did not know the number of plans into which he figured. He caught him in his arms with a chuckle.

"Orinus, my boy! I see Lord Beoulve didn't lose track of you!"

Dycedarg walked towards them, discarding a blade of grass that had previously been between his thumbs. Orinus looked back towards him but didn't say anything.

"That's a fine piece of foolishness on your part." Bestrald laughed. "You'll draw the Romandans back into another war if he learns that trick and spends the autumn piping at them."

The smile faded from Dycedarg's lips as he drew close. He gestured to where a bandage lay tied over the child's throat. "We ran into an unwelcome visitor in Yadrow, by the way."

Bestrald said nothing. He did not want to hear the particulars at present.

"Be careful with him, in any event," Dycedarg laid a hand on his shoulder. "More careful than me if you can be."

Bestrald nodded. He bounced Orinus a little as he scanned the edge of the water for the promised vessel.

"Where's mother?" the boy asked rather suddenly.

Bestrald froze as Dycedarg turned sharply to look at him.

"Your mother will take a little longer to reach you," he said slowly. "Lord Beoulve's brother had some trouble bringing her here."

"Why?"

His voice fell as he tried to smile "We can talk about it later."

Before the prince could find space to cry, Bestrald summoned one of the two knights to escort him to the docks. He folded an almond fig into the boy's hand before smoothing his hair down with a kiss.

"Bestrald," Dycedarg began as soon as the child was out of earshot, "what happ—"

"The general was shot in the Araguay," he said in a low voice. "There's been a formal declaration as to the queen's arrest, but it isn't clear yet where they've taken her."

He was trying to be very matter of fact about it. He realized, however, as Dycedarg looked at him in stunned silence, that he'd omitted detail in exchange for detachment.

"Zalbag lived, by the way."

Dycedarg nodded, exhaling rather deeply as he did so.

"He's out near Goland. Gulofavia was a mess without him, and he's a mess himself, but they say he's weathered the worst of it. In the meantime, you should be congratulated. You're the only thing in this week of disasters that's gone right."

"They nearly cut his throat, Bestrald."

"Well he doesn't seem that much the worse for it. Trust me when I say that you've been indispensable."

"I don't think I will, but thank you anyway."

Bestrald ignored the odd retort and motioned for the other knight to follow him. He reckoned he had best be joining his nephew rather than staying in the midst of his friend's understandable disquiet. He clapped him on the shoulder.

"Cheer up, Dycedarg. It's a bad opening, but we've been anticipating this for a while now." He smiled. "We'll regroup. Your brother will mend as he always has. My sister will endure as she always has. I imagine in a year or so, that child will be back on Ivalician soil, and have you to thank for it."

Dycedarg did not smile, but he accepted his hand in parting.

"Look to that day, Dycedarg, and not to the past," he said brightly. "To your reckoning, it will be almost as good as a Beoulve on the throne."

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